Compared to unpaid leave, paid family leave may better help working parents balance the competing needs of job and family early in a child's life, among other advantages. Yet the United States remains one of only two countries in the world without a statutory national paid maternity leave policy, and one of the only high-income countries that…

Alleviating disadvantage in low-income environments predicts higher cognitive abilities during early childhood. It is less established whether family income continues to predict cognitive growth in later childhood or whether there may even be bidirectional dynamics. Notably, living in poverty may moderate income-cognition dynamics. In this study,…

The primary goal of the current study was to test whether parent and adolescent preference for a common language moderates the association between parenting and rank-order change over time in offspring substance use. A sample of Mexican-origin 7th-grade adolescents (M[subscript age] = 12.5 years, N = 194, 52% female) was measured longitudinally on…

Relations between paternal autonomy support and four aspects of adolescent social competence and responsibility at age 16 were examined using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. With controls on maternal autonomy support, significant relations were observed between paternal autonomy support and three of the four…

Community studies indicating that affluence has social-emotional consequences for youth have conflated family and neighborhood wealth. We examined adolescent boys' delinquency and adolescent girls' anxiety-depression as a function of family, neighborhood, and cumulative affluence in a sample that is primarily of European-American descent, but…

Some 26 Mexican American families of East Los Angeles having children in Head Start responded to a questionnaire gathering data on birthplace, family income, number of individuals in the home, and pregnancy history of the mothers. Questionnaire results recorded in this document indicate that 46% of the mothers and 35% of the fathers were born in…

Rising maternal employment, welfare reform, and increased preschool enrollment contribute to accelerating family demand for child care in California, and federal and state governments have responded by doubling support for child care and preschool programs between 1996 and 1999. However, there is little information available on how child care…

This report examines patterns of child care use in 2000-2001 for children ages 0-5 who were not yet enrolled in kindergarten or first grade. Specifically, the report examines whether or not non-parental child care was used, the primary type of child care used, the amount of child care used per week, the number of arrangements, the cost of care,…